SKYWALKING

So enough about staring at the ground while walking; maybe it’s time to look at the sky.  I’ve always liked skies.  I remember being at college and a group of us had been to a lecture on landscape poetry and at least two of us said, “Nah, I don’t really get landscape, but I get clouds.”  And I’ve always taken a picture or two of interesting clouds while I’m out walking – I suppose many people do.  Like this one:

And so I’ve been reading The Cloudspotter’s Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, begetter of The Cloud Appreciation Society.

It’s one of those books that’s such a brilliant idea you wonder why somebody else (as in me) didn’t think of it before.  I’m thinking I’ll write about it at greater length at some point, but for now suffice to say that if nothing else it makes you look at the sky in a new way.

Now, I have been known to complain about the skies of Los Angeles, that they’re too tame and featureless and samey.  Although of course the more you look the more you see, and lately it seems to me that they’ve been a lot less samey, which of course says more about me than it does about them.

So I was out walking in the Nicholson acres a few days ago and I saw a strange circle in the sky.  I knew it wasn’t a cloud, but I didn’t know what it was: a chem trail, an alien signal?

Well no, I soon realized it was a vapor trail.  And the plane filled in the circle so that it what looked like a smiley face, or at least an O with eyes and a mouth, though of course it was upside down from where I was standing.

But the plane hadn’t finished. Next came a letter B, which I thought might be some reference some reference to President Obama.

But then a D appeared.  OBD – there aren’t many words start that way.   Obdurate was the only one that sprang to mind, though that seemed an odd thing to write in the sky.

Anywa,y to cut a long story short, after that there was an A, and then a Y.  But it still took a moment or two to realize what OBDAY meant.  But I eventually worked out that yes, the O was indeed a smiley face, or more precisely a happy face, and B was for birth. So it was saying Happy Birthday.  I suppose you’d have to be impressed if somebody employed a skywriter to celebrate your birthday, but OBDAY still seems a slightly banal thing to write in the sky, or anywhere else.

So I started thinking, what would be a less banal?  Well you see I think words are not the way to go.  One word or even two or three are never going to be very profound.  Love, Peace, Walk Tall, Kilroy was here – it’s just not quite good enough.  So I think I’d go for a symbol, an actual glyph, maybe something from the alchemy – perhaps this symbol for Transformation.

That’d be a nice challenge for a sky writer, and would certainly be an amazing thing to see in the sky while you were out walking.

And as a coda, there was quite a bit of wind high up in the sky on the day the pilot wrote OBDAY.  The letters started to drift and smudge as soon as they’d been done, and after the message was written, and after the wind had done it’s work you were left with a configuration that I think would have perplexed even the keenest cloudspotter.

THE WALK OF SELF-LOATHING

There’s a story, maybe it’s a fable, maybe it’s even in the Bible (in which case I suppose it’s a parable), about a man who goes around, walking in the usual way, looking at this, looking at that, just generally looking in all directions at whatever grabs his attention.

And one day he happens to look down and he sees money lying on the ground.  It has to be a shiny coin of some value for the story to work, so let’s say it’s a silver dollar.  He picks it up and changes his life.  From then on whenever he walks he only looks at the ground, hoping to find more money.

And he goes around like that for years, always looking at the ground when he walks, but he never finds any more silver dollars.  And then one day he’s walking along and he sees something shining in the gutter and he thinks, “OK, at last, more money!”  But it isn’t a silver coin, it’s a fragment of broken mirror and when he looks down at it he sees a reflection of the sky up above his head, and then he looks up at the sky itself and he sees it looks wonderful, and he realizes what he’s been missing all these years.

 

Well, I certainly look around at thing as I walk.  I like to think I look in all directions (though not all simultaneously, of course), and sometimes I do look notice things on the ground.  I think I have found the odd bit of money here and there, but not much, and I’m sure I must have seen a few mirror fragments.  But it hasn’t changed my life.

And lately, I’ve been noticing things painted on the pavements and sidewalks where I’m walking.  Some of it’s street art, and some of it’s done by guys who work for the utility companies, and the latter is usually much more inscrutable and enigmatic.

Of course on Hollywood Boulevard you have to look down at the ground if you want to see the Walk of Fame and the stars set in the concrete, that celebrate showbiz people.  But a couple of miles east of the Walk of Fame, I found this star that celebrates self-loathing. 

It’s a Hollywood thing, I’m sure, but by no means only a Hollywood thing.